The New York Times has published Paul Krugman’s piece Grand Old Planet.  Talking about Senator Marco Rubio’s interview in GQ magazine, Krugman said:

…Mr. Rubio was asked how old the earth is. After declaring “I’m not a scientist, man,” the senator went into desperate evasive action, ending with the declaration that “it’s one of the great mysteries.”

What was Mr. Rubio’s complaint about science teaching? That it might undermine children’s faith in what their parents told them to believe. And right there you have the modern G.O.P.’s attitude, not just toward biology, but toward everything: If evidence seems to contradict faith, suppress the evidence.
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But the same phenomenon is visible in many other fields. The most recent demonstration came in the matter of election polls. Coming into the recent election, state-level polling clearly pointed to an Obama victory — yet more or less the whole Republican Party refused to acknowledge this reality. Instead, pundits and politicians alike fiercely denied the numbers and personally attacked anyone pointing out the obvious; the demonizing of The Times’s Nate Silver, in particular, was remarkable to behold.

With respect to Nate Silver you can infer a much more sinister reading of the GOP after looking at my previous post Did Anonymous stop Karl Rove from Stealing Ohio again?

The reason why Nate Silver’s reputation had to be was destroyed was to cover the theft of the election that the Republicans knew was in the works.  Of course, the Republicans didn’t know that a bunch of computer hackers would thwart their plans.

I have no way of knowing if this counter-conspiracy theory is true, but I like to spread the rumor anyway.  It sounds so very plausible.

Thanks to RogerG for posting a link to the Krugman article on his Facebook page.

The Economist has the article James Bond economics sub-titled “Casino Royale was all about the financial crisis ”

MANY villains from the James Bond film franchise had madcap schemes for getting rich, like building solar power plants. Some, however, were far more pedestrian: drug lords, water monopolists, and corrupt Soviet generals. The most interesting of these (from an economist’s perspective, anyway) was Le Chiffre, 007’s antagonist in Casino Royale:

Le Chiffre’s business was similar to many other financial firms. He secured cheap funding by issuing deposit-like liabilities. This was pretty easy, since Le Chiffre promised his clients “no risk in the portfolio,” easy access to their savings, and “a reasonable rate of return.” In the days before Bernie Madoff, who wouldn’t want to bank with a man offering that deal? Besides, Le Chiffre’s clientele had few alternatives. Unlike Mr Madoff, however, Le Chiffre actually generated significant alpha for his investors thanks to insider trading, which is far from a unique strategy.

Read the article for more details of how Le Chiffre was just another arm of the financial crisis.